I've been looking for a discussion on this and I haven't seen one, so forgive me if I repeat someone elses thread.

I just played a game at challenging difficulty (all ai's are bright) and won by influence. I noticed my population was miles ahead of everyones and when I got advanced espionage on everyone I noticed that none of the AIs had built farms. Planets with quality 16 were capped at 5 billion people.

I could understand the ai not building farms on easier difficulties, but I would figure that bright ai's would.

Here are some of the things I noticed.

1) my economy dwarfed the ai economies cause of my extra taxpayers
2) my average tax rate was about 10% lower then then theres because they were trying to keep up and I could afford it
3) the ais all had better morale then me, which clearly shows they had room for growth
4) in my games the ai's ALWAYS spend themselves broke, starting the game with a huge advantage but when they hit rockbottom, their spending goes to zero and they effectively fall out of the game. I think this is potentially another bug (I could understand one ai doing it, but all of them?) but its compounded by the low populations
5) the ai seems to really like xeno farming...i have gotten really good deals trading it, which is odd cause the computer couldnt make use of it
6) All their planets were extremely easy to invade

All in all, it was a very shallow win and it makes the game far to easy, and for me, unenjoyable.